Researchers claim test tube babies and planes were invented thousands of years ago at 'pseudoscientific' Indian science convention

Government scientist blasts decision to allow scientists to repeat 'scientifically completely untenable' claims

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Ancient people had test tube babies, guided missiles and a range of aircraft, according to controversial claims made at a gathering of leading Indian scientists. And what's more, Einstein and Newton were wrong, the same meeting has been told.

A major conference in India has been the subject of vociferous protests after it allowed a series of speakers to make a range of "irrational and unscientific" claims. The Indian Science Congress was opened by prime minister Narendra Modi this week, but has been overshadowed by the various, widely-ridiculed suggestions made by some speakers.

Those included suggestions that Einstein had tricked the world, that Newton was mistaken about the theory of gravity he proposed, and that a range of newly invented technologies were actually discovered in India a long time ago.

One session saw a researcher mock the claims of many of the world's greatest physicists and claimed that he had reached bigger breakthroughs that proved them wrong. He also suggested that gravitational waves should be renamed "Narendra Modi waves".

And the most controversial of the claims came during a lecture in which a researcher attempted to link current science with ancient Indian texts. Gollapalli Nageswara Rao, the vice chancellor of Andhra University, suggested that Hindu mythology contained many of the advances that were actually discovered far more recently.

He referred for example to a story in the Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit text, in which a woman gives birth to 100 children. Such a breakthrough was only possible because of stem cell technology of the kind only recently pioneered, he said.

“Even today, many people don’t understand what stem cell is,” he said according to local reports. “But thousands of years ago we had this technology.”

In an angry blog post, the government's science advisor K VijayRaghavan blasted the decision to invite the speakers. He said Rao's claims were "scientifically completely untenable" and that it was unfortunate he had given the talk at the congress.

He called on other scientists to reject the claims, which he labelled pseudoscience, and to stop allowing such absurd claims to enjoy such significant attention.

The speeches have been met with outcry from India's scientific community, which is holding a variety of protests in an attempt to stem the spread of the claims.

The organisers of the conference also distanced themselves from the speeches, saying that the talks were "unfortunate".